Do you think they would have done the same if the forced movement rules were different? Or was it that there might be pit traps as well as pits?
I think they were worried about being knocked into the pits by traps or monsters. The actual episode took place over 2 years ago, so my memory is not perfect, and even at the time I don't know if it was all spelled out. As best I can recall, it was a mix of in-character and metagame reasoning, along the lines of:
* the pits are deep enough to hurt us badly - especially our squishies - if we fall in;
* this place has traps and monsters that might try and knock people into pits;
*the corridor that leads into the room with the pits has stairs going gently down, suggesting possible slide/chute traps;
* pemerton is the sort of GM who woudn't bother placing pits without also placing something there that might knock us in;
* so let's rope together!
As it turns out, I didn't have anything slide/chute designed - the sloping corridor was rather (i) to make my dungeon geography work out the way I wanted it to, and (ii) to have some stairs in that corridor to make the fight with the undead bursting out of the side-crypts more interesting (the PCs had already fought those undead, and worked out most of the relevant geography, but weren't to know that they had, thereby, exhausted the metagame rationale for the downward slope).
But I did have forced movement in mind, namely, my wight.
From memory they roped with the strong dwarf fighter in the middle, the CHA paladin and archer-ranger flanking him, and the wizard and sorcerer at the ends. I'm pretty sure that it was the ranger who fell into the pit and was saved by the dwarf making a STR check (and/or Dwarven Stability saving throw - as I said, my memory is a bit hazy). As best I recall, the dominant concern at the table wasn't so much "Why exactly is my guy falling back into the bit" - I'm sure I narrated the "recoiling in fear" thing, and no one contested that - but rather "Woohoo! Our roping together worked!" and then making the appropriate checks to pull the ranger up etc.
The deathlock wight then died pretty quickly, as the sorcerer got a good crit with Blazing Starfall (radiant damage). But I didn't mind too much, because it had already got to do its thing.
Looking at Horrifying Visage, I think the example suffers from the 4E overuse of "Push", along with the missing "Psychic" keyword. Those, plus a simple sentence, "The target reacts in abject terror, springing back from the wight." That, along with a new tone of "hey, these are 90% abilities; according to your players tastes, you will want to adjust these to adapt to particular circumstances" would remove the disassociation from Horrifying Visage.
It has the Psychic keyword.
The addition of the Psychic keyword was made after the example was presented. I agree that once the keyword is added the disassociation lessens.
The psychic keyword is not present in the 4e Monster Manual. As best I can tell, it was added in by the revision of the wight by Logan Bonner published in Dungeon magazine a year or so ago (and available for free online). It clearly
should have been there from the start - its absence in very obviously a drafting oversight, I think.
"Push", without quotes means an actual push.
I don't agree with this - or, rather, "push" in 4e mechanical text always has quotes around it. It is a technical term with both ingame and metagame aspects. (Like many D&D mechanics - hit points are the poster child - it mixes ingame and metagame shamelessly. This used to irritate me about D&D, but 4e has persuaded me that it can be a huge strength, because at least for some players it seems to facilitate going metagame without losing inhabitation of character and an ingame orientation towards the fiction.)
I really don't think the 4E presentation went far enough to describe the limitations of keywords. There is some encouragement, but rather much the policy, as presented, seemed to be to mostly work within the supplied mechanical effect.
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That is, they say to describe the effect however you please, but not on the "the described mechanical application is built to have limited accuracy".
I think the 4e presentation of keywords is terrible. In the parts of the rules dedicated to explaining keywords,
only their mechanical effect is discussed. The only part of the rules that talks about their role in anchoring the mechanics to the fiction is in the discussion of damaging objects, and there it's oblique and implicit rather than explicit (eg objects are immune to psychic damage, the GM may rule that paper and wood are vulnerable to fire damage, etc). So, for example,
nowhere in the 4e rules does it say that the [fear] keyword, when it occurs in the context of a forced movement power, is intended to help establish the interpretation of the movement in the gameworld (eg as recoiling in horror).
I think this is about as bad an error as can happen in the presentation of rules. It's tantamount to setting up a combat system based on rolls against target numbers, and not even saying that the roll against target number represents an attack.
And the practical consequence is that many RPGers looking at 4e have seen a "fiction free" board game. Which is a false perception - the keywords set up the parameters of a pretty rich fiction - but one which the rules not only fail to dispel, but actively encouraged by talking about keywords only in terms of mechanical interactions.
A question: Do you find detail that you provide for the examples to make the abilities more satisfying?
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What bugs me most is that the designer has either thought of these details, and has chosen to (or been forced to) omit them, or has made them up as a kind of gamist detail
I myself prefer to see lots of background detail.
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As a very different example, see the 4E Monster Manual I, which is quite sparse, and rather a terrible read, *but*, has more simple utility and quite a few more monsters packed into the same space.
I think we're getting down to a difference in reading styles here
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I don't think there was a single one of those cases where the designer didn't think of the fluff, write the mechanical implementation of that fluff down, and convey to both Tony Vargas and myself what was actually happening in the game world. It was written tersely - but the flavour and the explanation are at the very least implied.
I ignore designer provided fluff. I'm only interested in their mechanics, because frankly we all have imaginations that can handle this.
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With minimal fluff CaGI has many scenarios it can be used in.
Interesting points. I am closer to Neonchameleon and nightwalker450 than to Tom - I think that the abilities like Disciplined, Armour Piercing, Savage etc
already contain sufficient colour to make it clear what is going on in the fiction, at least typically, and to support extrapolation to less typical and corner cases.
I'm also a staunch (if minoriy) defender of the 4e MM. Once you correct their damage, I think it has plenty of good monsters even at Paragon Tier (I haven't got to Epic yet). And I think it has a perfect amount of flavour - and is far less sparse than is often claimed. For example, when I compare it to AD&D 1st ed, or 3E (I don't have a lot of 2nd ed monster stuff) it is typically richer in its flavour text. For example, it gives me a history and sociology of goblinoids. Its spider entry also has a history of Lolth and some drow sociology. It has a history of the Abyss and details of the layers of the Hells (which is more than I get in AD&D or 3E). Etc.
FATE focuses on narrative aspects and (okay, I'm drawing from my Dresden Files campaign here) in this case the Wraith is probably less of a 'random encounter' (since those don't happen) and is more likely attacking someone the PCs care about. So unless they have the strength of will to stick around long enough to get the person out of there/defeat the wraith then they'll be faced with that person dying
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So to rescue this person they might even accept drastic long-term consequences, such as an outright phobia towards darkness, or long-lasting paranoia that takes sessions to fade.
My 4e campaign isn't quite as intense as this in the stakes of every combat, but I lean more this way then the "random encounter" way. 4e is a good fit for me in this respect - it
wants every combat to be a big deal, and
I want every combat to be a big(gish) deal.
The 4e MM helps with this, actually, by locating many creatures within the context of the cosmological conflicts that are at the heart of 4e's default fiction, and therefore making it easier to set up combats that have stakes - cosmological stakes - that are bigger than the mere combat itself.
(And for what it's worth I picked fireball because it's an iconic spell; I hadn't realised quite how bad the rules were for it in 3.5 before this thread).
